As we gear up to bid a fond farewell to 2012, let’s look at the things that made the year so great for our billionaires. Starting with David Cray Johnson’s: The Fortunate 400

Six American families paid no federal income taxes in 2009 while making something on the order of $200 million each. This is one of many stunning revelations in new IRS data that deserves a thorough airing in this year’s election campaign.

CTJ looked at 280 companies, all of them members of the Fortune 500, and found that “while the federal corporate tax code ostensibly requires big corporations to pay a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, on average, the 280 corporations in our study paid only about half that amount.” And those who paid even half the statutory corporate tax rate paid far more than many of their competitors.

Now the sources for this guide were found on the fly, so if you can find more accurate numbers, have at. My time is valuable.

Let’s pretend you are lucky enough to work 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job. (Although we know this isn’t always the case. But, if you are a go-getter you can always get 2 or more jobs, right?)

This would have you working 160 hours per month at $7.25 per hour = $1160 Income.(For the sake of simplicity we won’t even take out taxes, it’s the Billionaire Way. Which in reality would leave you with approximately $950.00 for the month)

Total Income: $1160

Expenditures:

Let’s pretend you live where the rents are the absolute lowest in the country… somewhere like Canton, OH or Spartanburg, SC

So your bare minimum, absolute basic necessities. No clothes, no personal products, no frills, no car, no transportation, no doctor’s visits, no dentist, no cable, no phone, no internet = $1138.66

Which leaves you with $22.00 per month to do all those things beyond the bare minimum.

And if you scrimp and save and work really, really hard and you don’t cause trouble and you don’t ask questions, then you too will be able to …. Oh, who am I kidding? Really we don’t care. As long as you keep working and buying we really don’t care.

“I mean, we have a right to golf,” the 29-year-old community organizer proclaimed on Saturday. He was wearing a khaki suit and standing under the palms of Pleasanton, California’s Castlewood Country Club, where a dozen or so protesters had gathered near the 14th hole, next to a tent on which someone had written, “Save the 1%!” The group had come together to support Castlewood’s two-year lockout of its unionized cooks, dishwashers, and janitors—people who “are asking for so much,” Woiwode told me as another demonstrator sipped Perrier. “They are asking for health care and asking for their good jobs back. Why don’t they go out there and find other jobs?”

Pleasanton, a town of 70,000 southeast of Oakland, is fertile territory for a 1 percenter movement; the Census Bureau ranks it as the nation’s wealthiest mid-sized city. Located a short drive from the cute Main Street, the grounds of the Castlewood Country Club once surrounded a 53-room mansion inhabited by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the mother of the Gilded Age newspaper magnate. Porsches typically clog the club’s parking lot and weekend warriors zip past its fairway on carbon-fiber Kestrels. On this day, one of them slowed down just enough to shout a single word at the Save-the-1-Percenters: “Idiots!”

Whether the biker thought the protesters ridiculous or just not rich enough was hard to say. Instead of the club’s de rigueur golf shirts and yoga pants, members of the group sported a faded top hat, wrinkled knickers, and a full-length evening gown of questionable vintage. Woiwode’s suit seemed ill-tailored and his Dockers the knockoff kind, but he didn’t let that curb his enthusiasm. “The real idiots are the people who are talking about trying to spread the wealth around,” said Woiwode (who works for anti-poverty groups in Oakland when he’s not advocating for the rich). He clutched a handmade placard that read: “Can I pay you to hold this sign? (It’s heavy)”.

Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square-foot Brooklyn duplex.

“I feel stuck,” Schiff said. “The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach.”
…

“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”…